Attention-Based Hybrid Deep Learning Network for Human Activity Recognition Using WiFi Channel State Information

Sakorn Mekruksavanich, Wikanda Phaphan, Narit Hnoohom, Anuchit Jitpattanakul

The recognition of human movements is a crucial aspect of AI-related research fields. Although methods using vision and sensors provide more valuable data, they come at the expense of inconvenience to users and social limitations including privacy issues. WiFi-based sensing methods are increasingly being used to collect data on human activity due to their ubiquity, versatility, and high performance. Channel state information (CSI), a characteristic of WiFi signals, can be employed to identify various human activities. Traditional machine learning approaches depend on manually designed features, so recent studies propose leveraging deep learning capabilities to automatically extract features from raw CSI data. This research introduces a versatile framework for recognizing human activities by utilizing CSI data and evaluates its effectiveness on different deep learning networks. A hybrid deep learning network called CNN-GRU-AttNet is proposed to automatically extract informative spatial-temporal features from raw CSI data and efficiently classify activities. The effectiveness of a hybrid model is assessed by comparing it with five conventional deep learning models (CNN, LSTM, BiLSTM, GRU, and BiGRU) on two widely recognized benchmark datasets (CSI-HAR and StanWiFi). The experimental results demonstrate that the CNN-GRU-AttNet model surpasses previous state-of-the-art techniques, leading to an average accuracy improvement of up to 4.62%. Therefore, the proposed hybrid model is suitable for identifying human actions using CSI data.